"Troublemakers" at my School Placement

One child in my school placement often gets up from his seat and looks for different reasons to be moving around the room. During the two hours that I was there last week, he went to the bathroom six or seven times. The first grade bilingual classroom teacher asked if he was having a problem and when he responded "no," she just said we're going to have to talk to mom about this. She said yes to him every time he asked to go. There classroom procedure for signing out to go to the bathroom is to go to the back corner of the room and fill out a clipboard checklist and then go to the wall next to the door to put on a lanyard bathroom pass. Every time he went to sign out, he took the long way walking slowly around the whole room. He would walk back and forth between the clipboard and the lanyards a few times and then leave the room for maybe a minute before he came back. When he would come back to the room he would have to sign back in and put back the lanyard. He would again pace back and forth a few times and then slowly make his way back to his spot. 

This student is a 6 or 7 year old male student of color. The times that I have seen him, he wore jeans and a sweatshirt with a tank top underneath. The teacher is a white older female. Many of the students in the class speak another language at home. 

When the students were sitting on their spots on the rug for a science lesson, this student was spitting into his hand and playing with it. The teacher did not say anything about this for a while. When she did say something, she told him "____, that is disgusting." He did not converse with his partner student during discussion time he just sat and looked around. I saw that while he was supposed to be doing iready, he just kept exiting the work screen to look at his times/minutes and then going back, completing one problem and checking the time again.

This behavior is not necessarily what most would describe as a "troublemaker," but in this classroom this is the only different behavior that I witnessed. The class has 16 students and several of them were not paying attention when they were sitting on the rug. There is one white student in the class, and the rest are not white. Several of them were also not actively doing their iready. When they were supposed to be talking to each other about their science lesson, there were a few of them who would not talk or participate with their partner. The teacher did not encourage this student to talk to his peers, but she did encourage other students.

For the most part, all of the students listened to the teacher and did not speak out. They sat when they were supposed to sit and answered the teachers questions. They mostly seemed to know what was expected of them and they did this.